Estimates vary, but if you do the math you have about 2.5 billion heartbeats available in your lifetime. Based on your current age, you can guess at how many of yours remain, give or take a few million.

You would be wrong if you said you didn’t want to use those heartbeats up in aerobic exercise. Fear not. Although your pulse, beats per minute, can easily double during exercise, doing the math shows that it is a good investment. Actually, the long term effect of aerobic work-outs (like running) is to slow the heart rate. You make the heart stronger and more efficient. It then has to work less often, slower pulse, to do the same amount of work.

Doing the math, a few hours a week of elevated metabolism results in hundreds of hours of easy work for the heart. Resting pulse rates for aerobically trained athletes are often in the 40s. That’s amazing leverage in the use of your lifetime of heartbeats!

It’s easy to do the numbers with the heart. But your muscles, lungs, circulation and the rest of your system enjoy similar benefits, except there is no way to quantify them. Runners know those benefits. Their life clock beats slowly and they feel better.

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Whether you run five miles a week or train for a marathon, you face the same issue. You are asking your body to do something it would rather not. At any level of training, as you run your body is learning stamina. Your muscles are learning to store more glycogen. There will be a direct relationship between the number of miles you run and your muscles ability to go the distance.

To me, stamina and endurance are not the same. It depends on the level of your training, of course, but at some point, at some distance, you will run out of fuel. As the glycogen levels decline, you will ask your body to keep going. Yes, you will use all of your stamina and you will need something more to finish the race or just to keep a training promise. When your body runs out of gas you can ask it to keep going, to use the last gallon.

When your legs and lungs are ready to quit, you need endurance, the ability to endure pain. Fortunately, as you train your body to go the distance, you are also conditioning your mind. You learn that going on won’t kill you. You are learning to endure.

Stamina=physical Endurance=mental

I don’t know what the average cost of entering a marathon, or half marathon, is these days. I know the marathon I run each year has increased the entry fee by about 300% in less than twenty years.

As in any other business, costs go up and they have to be passed down to consumers. Running events have gotten so big that everything about them is big. Apparently there is no economy of scale in the promotion, advertising, security, facility rental, permits, staff, medical, legal, printing, mailing and all the other expenses of an event.

That leads me to the $100 T-shirt. My wife would gladly help me find a nice T-shirt for less than $10. And she wonders, correctly, why I can’t just run 26 miles on my own, without 7000 other people. She could also point out, with appropriate sarcasm, that I usually run for solitude.

Well, I train without 7000 people. I put on the miles on my own. And I do enjoy solitude. But ultimately, the marathon is the goal I work for. I could do it all without that goal. But I don’t want to!

I wear t-shirts a lot, all summer anyway, and I like to say I don’t wear one unless I ran the race or walked the walk. (Celiac walk, a fund raiser for Celiac disease research. Good t-shirts!)

The $100 hamburger is common in general aviation, flying small airplanes. The cost of firing up the bird and flying to a nearby airport for a meal far exceeds the value of the meal by itself. It is flying for fun that just happens to include a hamburger. These days, when a lift ticket at a ski area or a round of golf is nearly $100, I guess a marathon or two per year is not a waste of money.

And I get the neat T-shirt.

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I suppose I appreciate James Brooks because I am a Grandfather, a runner and a pilot.

Brooks is a WWII fighter pilot, double Ace, who flew 55 combat missions in a P-51 Mustang. Still running in his late eighties he and the P-51 are the subject of a great video, a Gray Eagles film by Chris Woods. View it at http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500 (It is narrated by Peter Coyote)

This is a touching video about one of the remaining members of what has been called “the greatest generation.” It is about Brook’s relationship with his grandchildren, a reunion with other P-51 pilots and a his chance to fly “the greatest fighter aircraft” again, in his eighties.

It is easy for me to identify with flight footage shot over eastern Idaho in view of the Tetons. It’s where we recently enjoyed seven winters.

What is clear from the video is that, at his age, Major Brooks is still physically active and mentally sharp. We should all hope, as we age, to do as well.

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—I thought I was special. There was an ICD, an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator sewed into my chest. There I was, still running marathons. More than that, I was feeling great. We were In Duluth, Minnesota, at Grandma’s Marathon a few years ago.
—The weather was perfect and I was running with my youngest daughter, her first marathon. We weren’t making great time, but she had an IT band issue and it was about my 17th marathon. I had nothing to prove. I was making jokes to ease her pain. I knew that an Elvis impersonator would be at about mile 18. I told her we would run until we saw Elvis, then we could walk for a while.
—Funny thing happened at a potty stop. Waiting in line, I started talking with another runner (about my age.) As we started edging around health issues and I was getting ready to mention my ICD, he told me about his heart transplant. Heart transplant? I thought it was enough to run with an ICD, to back up my cardiac rhythm.
—This guy had traded in his heart for someone else’s and he was still running marathons.
—Unfortunately, I never got his name or bib number. I would love to know how he finished. He and my daughter made me proud that day. She endured and so did he.

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Here’s the difference:
—BEFORE THE RUN–As I’ve written before, often it’s about the attitude at the start. Joy and gratitude help!
—DURING THE RUN–How I feel during the run is the result of a good warmup and proper stretching. Dressing right for the weather and being properly hydrated (instead of overwatered.) And for me, very little in the stomach.
—AFTER THE RUN–According to Dr. Steven Jonas in the Merck Manual of Medical Information, there are two possible types of muscle discomfort after exercise.
—–Desirable: delayed onset muscle soreness (doesn’t start until hours after intense exercise) Usually affects both sides of the body equally, more or less. Goes away after 48 hours. Feels better after the warm up for the next workout.
—–Undesirable muscle discomfort: injury, usually felt soon after it occurs, is worse on one side of the body, does not disappear after 48 hours and becomes more severe when exercise is resumed.

—Novice runners often interpret all muscle discomfort, even good discomfort, as a sign of injury.
—Experienced runners often advise “running through” or ignoring the pain. But that only works if the “injury” is delayed onset muscle soreness. A real injury may stop you in your tracks and trying to “run through” it will not work. Keep going, but if it doesn’t go away in a short time, it is a real injury. Fortunately, you won’t usually do any more damage trying to “run through” the pain.
—For some, a true injury is an opportunity to quit running. For the dedicated among us, it is motivation to proactively rehab the injury and to take greater care in the future with stretching and warmup.

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—So, is it enough to just keep doing the same thing day in day out, year after year? There is comfort in routine. (Unless you are overcome with boredom.)
—In my experience, you need to be seeking constant improvement just to maintain your fitness.
—As you age, if you are satisfied with the same old route, the same old pace, you will gradually lose your edge. I am not suggesting that your goal should be winning races, but if you keep pushing yourself, incrementally, to run farther, faster, better, you will at least maintain. At a minimum, maintenance should be your goal. And I hope you can do even better.
—How about a New Year’s resolution? Resolution means Resolve. By this time next year try to be a better runner than you are today. Aspire! Resolve!

—Why do you run? Each of us has a different reason. The motives range from fitness to fatness. Health to weight loss and points between like vanity. Face it; until they get that emaciated death camp look, runners look good. For me, solitude is important. That’s why I usually run by myself.
—Solitude is followed closely by concern for my heart. In my time I have attended too many congestive heart failure patients. I would rather die with my running shoes on my feet. And, in spite of 40 years of running, I have had two heart attacks. So for me cardiac fitness is serious motivation.
—Whatever gets us on the road, the answer for many runners is LSD, Long Slow Distance. Long runs with your pulse in the training range, aerobic, are best for your heart and for weight loss.
—Training range is a pulse between 70 and 85% of maximum. Maximum heart rate is best determined by a stress test, but the rule of thumb is 220 minus your age. So if your age is 45 your maximum heart rate is 175. Best cardiac training would happen at between 125 and 150 beats per minute.
—Keeping the pulse in the perfect training range for a long time builds the heart’s stamina, strength and probably increases collateral circulation in the heart, increasing blood flow to the muscle. And in LSD running your body learns to burn fat instead of readily available carbs. That’s what you want!
—Trouble is, sometimes it’s hard to stay in that range. It’s natural to want to run faster, to be better, to go farther. And I have always suggested that we should run the way we feel. If you feel good running faster, go for it!
—Fortunately, the more fit you become with LSD, the faster and farther you will be able to run while staying in the training range. Patience, patience! Win, win!

—The worst running advice…I’ve ever seen…was in a newspaper article some years ago. It quoted a high school track coach with questionable marathon qualifications. He suggested that all marathon training doesn’t have to be at a run. Of course, you need to put in the miles, but some of it can be at a walk.
—What? What did you say?
—To give him the benefit of the doubt, he may have been referring to interval training. Yet interval training is far more structured than just slowing to a walk when you feel like it.
—The value of running intervals is undeniable, particularly if you are working on speed. But training to run a long race like a marathon requires teaching yourself to endure, to keep going, to keep running! That is, after all, the challenge. For most of us It is as much an endurance contest as a race.
—In 26 miles you may have to walk, depending on how well you have trained. But if you train that way, I KNOW YOU WILL HAVE TO WALK! Actually been there, done that!
—Don’t be fooled! If you are going to run a marathon or a half marathon and you want to be adequately trained, you will need to put on the miles. Without stopping to rest!

—I know. You are tired from a long day at work; either from physical labor or stress that seems physical. Up and down stairs, in and out of the car, running back and forth, busy all day, you believe that work keeps you in shape.
—Truth is, ever since childhood you have learned to make work easier. You have been trained to use the most efficient tools, to rest periodically, to take breaks, to get help, to work in teams and to use any creative means to minimize effort. You get the job done, but in a way that makes it possible to keep going hour after hour.
—Exercise is just the opposite. Instead of trying to minimize effort we try to make it harder. Whether to lose pounds or to gain strength, speed and stamina, we intentionally add weight, reps and miles, ever increasing the difficulty of the work-out.
—So we try to make work easier and exercise harder. That means usually one can’t be substituted for the other. Sorry.
The upside? When you understand that work is not exercise, you have to believe that exercise is not work! Be happy to lace up your running shoes and hit the road.